English Rules

Respond to this Friday Faithfuls challenge by writing anything about the English language, if you think it is complicated to try and learn, or you could write about another language that you know. Or write about whatever else you think might fit.  English, like all the other languages that are not extinct, is constantly evolving.  Less than 100 years ago, most people preferred “ought” or “shall” over “need.”  “Cooperate” and “zoologist” were spelled “coöperate” and “zoölogist,” while “diarrhea” was written with ligatures, as “diarrhœa.”  The capital of Japan was known as “Tokio,” not “Tokyo.”  Latin was very popular in Europe until the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. when it started dying out.  Despite being one of the oldest languages in the world, the Sanskrit language which was known as the mother of all languages has faded away, although it is far from being extinct.  In the 11^th century, when India was under Muslim containment, several Muslim rulers replaced Sanskrit with Arabic.  Coptic an Egyptian language, Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Akkadian are all considered to be dead languages.  The English language is thriving being the most widely spoken language in the world, with an estimated 1.5 to 2 billion speakers.  It’s the official language in nearly 60 countries, and widely used in many more.  English is spoken in 101 countries, while Arabic is spoken in 60, French in 51, Chinese in 33, and Spanish in 31.  400 million people speak English as their first language, and no other language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe.

English is an SVO language, meaning that sentences in English follow the formula Subject-Verb-Object.  There are five other possible orders of the three elements (subject-object-verb), (verb-subject-object), (verb-object-subject), (object-verb-subject), (object-subject-verb), or a sentence can be formed without a dominant word order.  Sentences should follow this pattern or else the meaning of the sentence changes or the sentence won’t make sense.  Changing the order of the words can change the meaning of what you are saying, changing what was a statement into being a question as illustrated in, “life is like a box of chocolates” compared with “is life like a box of chocolates?”  Of all the word types (adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, determiners, interjections, nouns, pronouns and verbs) in English, verbs must surely be the most complicated.  Not only are verbs the keystones of a clause or sentence, but they can be modified to express grammatical features such as modality, transitivity, passivity, agreement and aspect.  Verb tenses are changes or additions to verbs used to show when the action took place, whether it was in the past, present, or future.  The phrase verb tense is also used for grammatical aspects, which add more details about the duration or time an action takes.  English has only two tenses, the past and the present, which seems simple enough, but when you combine aspect and modality with past and present tenses, twelve patterns emerge in English.  Aspect expresses periods of time, it can be a single block of time, a continuous flow of time or a repetitive occurrence.  Modality expresses past and future possibilities and hypotheticals, indicating a likelihood, ability, permission, request, capacity, suggestion, order, obligation, necessity, possibility or advice.

Most verbs in English are either transitive or intransitive.  A transitive verb has the structure noun + verb + noun, whereas an intransitive verb has the structure noun + verb.  A verb is transitive when the action of the verb passes from the subject to the direct object.  Intransitive verbs don’t need an object to make sense, as they have meaning on their own.  Some verbs can be both depending on how they are used in a sentence.  Phrasal verbs can also be classified as transitive or intransitive and they are formed when we combine a verb with a preposition of another grammatical element, and end up with a completely new meaning.  Dangling prepositions generally occur with prepositional verbs or phrasal verbs, so f you don’t want to confuse or distract your readers or listeners, leaving them hanging or stranded, then you must include an object after your preposition.  Active and passive verbs, are associated with voice, grammatical constructions that communicate certain information about an action.  In the active voice, the subject performs the action of the verb, while in passive voice, the subject receives the action.  Subject-verb agreement means that a subject and its verb must be both singular or both plural, thus a singular subject must be combined with a singular verb.

Grammatical gender is not for identifying individuals, it’s for classifying things.  Many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats, but in English we have pronouns like he, she and it that reflect gender, as well as suffixes like -man, -woman and -ess to mark gender.  The feminine suffix of -ess, turns a prince into a princess, an actor into an actress, just like the suffix of -ette, would turn a bachelor into a bachelorette and a Smurf into a Smurfette, but this suffix is also used to make things smaller, like changing a cigar into a cigarette, or a kitchen into a kitchenette.  English personal pronouns, have three cases subjective case (I, you, he etc.), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them) possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers etc.).  The English language uses Personal, Reflexive and Emphatic pronouns, where the pronouns I, mine, me, we, ours, us, all stand for the person or persons that are speaking and they are categorized for the person speaking in the first, second or third person.  Reflexive pronouns indicate that the action of the subject reflects back to the doer, and emphatic pronouns simply emphasize the doer of the action without indicating any reflexive relationship.

It’s possible to count the number of entries in a dictionary, but it’s not possible to count the number of words in a language and English has more words than most comparable world languages.  English has complex spelling rules, and the meanings of idioms such as “it’s raining cats and dogs”, are hard for people to understand the meaning.  Distinctive speech sounds are known as phonemes, being the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another, and English has around 44 phonemes, which is more than many other languages.  The five main components of language are phonemes, morphemes (smallest unit of a word that provides a specific meaning to a string of letters), lexemes (the set of all the inflected forms of a single word), syntax (arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences), and context (frame that surrounds the event and provides resources for its appropriate interpretation).

Along with grammar which is crucial to ensure that your message is delivered effectively for clear and precise communication, semantics which allows you to discover why meaning is more complex than simply the words formed in a sentence, and pragmatics which focuses on how context influences the interpretation of meaning in language, these components work together to create meaningful communication among individuals.  English has a tendency to borrow many words from other languages and it has been doing this since its infancy.  As many as 350 other languages are represented in the English language and their linguistic contributions actually make up about 80% of English!  In the future, the meaning some words will stay the same, but some may acquire an entirely different meaning over time.  In the 1920’s, “gay” meant “cheerful” and “carefree,” whereas today it is used to denote someone’s sexuality.  Long ago, if you were naughty, you had naught or nothing.  Then it came to mean evil or immoral, and now you are just badly behaved.  At one time it was a good thing to be egregious, because it meant you were distinguished or eminent.  But over time, the word took on a negative meaning of someone or something being conspicuously bad, not conspicuously good.